WALK
She said I looked like a faggot when I walked.
Something about the way my arms swung.
We had a membership at the city rec center
where she’d walk the indoor track and I’d use
the treadmills. I liked looking over the track
through the window to the pool where kids and seniors
had swim lessons. She said I sounded pathetic talking
about children. She said when she left me
she’d take all the kitchenware because I knew nothing
about cooking before we’d met. And by all the kitchenware,
she meant also the refrigerator and stove.
You have only yourself to blame, she said often.
Some of the pool kids must be out of high school by now.
Some of the seniors, dead. But I’m still angry,
angrier in fact, revealing something about my tendency
to hold a grudge, but also perhaps saving me
from a worse tendency toward inaction in the face of abuse,
one response to bullying I’ve held to all my life.
I walk outdoors now. I composed these words
walking. I sometimes wonder if anyone else notices
the way I swing my arms and can’t help but think of her
as I do. A doe on the berm crossed the two-lane road
as I thought these things. She was alone and I worried
about her crossing, turned back often on my path to watch.
Would others follow? How would I signal drivers if I had to?
All the while seeing how beautiful she was
and how this might be the epiphany in someone’s poem.
Anger and grace. Worry and wildness. The movement
toward instead of away. She made it across unharmed
and eventually I lost sight of her as we each pursued our purpose,
not redemption but survival, which I understand
to mean, I have only myself to forgive.
NOW I DRIVE STRAIGHT THROUGH
From you on whom I learned life lessons,
I beg forgiveness. Those who learned
Their lessons on me, I do not forgive.
Drop it, you might say,
As to a dog with a dead thing in its mouth.
And it’s true, when I get a good hold, I carry
It. To your hands that smell of strawberry,
To your hair curling like smoke up to the clouds,
Cumulus clouds, their curves softer
Than my own. How glad I am then
To be anything that knows what it is.
SONG
Shrouding them in fog, protecting them
from hunters, mountain lions, cruel boys,
the angels love the deer this morning more
than they love me. In the baby changing
room of the rest stop, crowned with treetops soft
as sparrows in a dust bath, a woman sings
“The Wheels on the Bus” as often as it takes
to keep a child from screaming. Round they go:
her voice, steady, clear, and calm; the child
fussing in fits and starts. Round and round,
all through the town, beyond the highway, woods,
and fog. By now, I’ve learned the route by heart.
KATHY FAGAN’s sixth poetry collection, winner of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Prize, is Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022). Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches poetry at The Ohio State University, where she co-founded the MFA Program and co-edits The Journal/OSU Press Wheeler Poetry Prize Series.
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